Damn straight. I just wrote this comment this morning. I'll copy/past most of it here:

Several decades ago, the U.S. Forest Service operated under a paradigm of active forest management. The forests were viewed as a public asset in the sense of it being of economic, not just intrinsic or recreation value. Many people aren't aware that the USFS is actually part of the Department of Agriculture.

The method of forest management during this time was to auction sections of the forests for harvest, subject to constraints of timber size and other factors. This practice, perhaps contrary to myth, was actually quite sustainable. Most harvesters were required to plant at least as many trees as they harvested. The relationship between the Forest Service and rural communities was generally pretty good during this time.

Because of this continual harvesting/planting, there wasn't much undergrowth buildup. That meant that if a fire started, it was easier to fight, and when fires started, the policy was to put them out because timber sales helped both the public and private sectors.

The shift away from this modus operandus had two primary causes, which I observed firsthand in the 80s. One was something of a philosophical change in the Forest Service. There was a belief that too many natural cycles were being interrupted via the prevailing approach. For example, some types of trees need fire to open up the cones and let out the seed (or so I was told at the time; I don't know if this is true or not). There was pressure to leave more and more areas untouched because of habitat concers for species like the Spotted Owl. So there were internal policy shifts happening, and a new guard was replacing the old.

The other factor was from outside the Forest Service. The growing environmentalist movement was finding they could exercise a lot of pressure via the courts. They saw the horrific results of clear-cutting in the Pacific Northwest and feared the same would result everywhere. Though well intentioned, they generally missed the difference in management practice conducted by the Forest Service and the replanting efforts by the harvesters.

I should note at this point also that some of the more extreme groups had motives beyond protecting the environment. Some groups, like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, are committed to seeing rural town in Southern Utah go away and for the entire region to be untouched, unmanaged wilderness.

The method employed by the environmental groups was pretty straighforward. They would wait for the Forest Service to make a timber sale, then challenge the sale in court. They knew they would likely fail, and they most often did, but that didn't matter. The court process takes several years. By the time a judge finally ruled in favor of the timber sale, the harvesters were already out of business. I saw this happen repeatedly.

The response to this by the Forest Service was to offer smaller sales in areas often dictated to them by some of the environmental groups. At the same time, their own internal bureaucracy was growing more and more cumbersome, so timber sales were taking longer and longer to set up. Further, their own regulations set a minimum bid price (think of it as a reserve price in an online auction) that must be met for each sale.

The harvesters, meanwhile, found it unprofitable to mobilize to the sites being offered for bid given the reduced potential revenue from the small sites. Today, many of the timber auctions get no bids at all.

Throughout the whole hoopla, the deadfall kept accumalting. When fires would start, they burned hotter, were harder to get to, and spread larger than before. In order to prevent fires, controlled burns (which sometimes became anything but controlled) were utilized as a tool to prevent wildfire. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Forest Service was now paying employees to burn down the forest instead of collecting revenue from fire sales.

In the 90s, at least in the region in I live, the bark beetle arrived. The foresters at the Forest Service identified it while there were still very few and put in place a plan to eradicate it. You can probably guess what happened next. Internal dithering at the Forest Service and outside pressure from environmentalists without a solid understanding of forestry combined into glorious inaction. The beetles spread. My favorite forest from my youth is now an ugly tinderbox.

I won't lie. This has turned a great many people in my region into environmentalist haters. I am surprised at times that the few self-proclaimed environmentalists in this area haven't had their houses burned down.

For my part, I don't hate environmentalists, but I do hate their religious zeal when it comes to things they really don't understand. I also hate the bureaucratic nightmare the FS has become.

The thing that really galls me, though, is the CO2 issue. The very same people who cry about CO2 emissions don't seem to mind the billowing towers of smoke from our forests every summer. They don't get that they are part of the problem. We could be harvesting enough biomass from dying forests every year to displace a good amount of coal burning if they would let it happen. They hyprocrisy pushes me to the edge.